She was a stranger in a strange land, and she knew not its ways.

The act of reframing a story was an act of creation, not just an act of deconstruction. It necessarily had a thesis, a statement—to reframe a story was to make a point by changing the story’s point.

My trideca-syllabic table companion had used his story to, effectively, accuse me of being an invasive ornamental plant, choking out a part of an ecosystem by my thriving without providing anything of practical value. Badger had described me as a wounded and near-broken person in need of a mellow-out intervention, and Hitz had described me as someone who’d make more fertile the metaphorical soil of Shem.

My story wasn’t about me, but it was a… salvo, or an argument, aimed at changing someone’s opinion of me. With my first two sentences, then, I was deflecting part of the description that Kibosh’s Novice had pinned on me by providing an alternative truth—and setting myself up to hopefully refute the rest.

Which was, well, the tricky part.

“But they knew strangers, in that land,” I said, embracing an old cadence I’d set aside for years, “for they remembered them, each and several. And every beast of the land and beast of the air, even every thing that walked, crawled or flew, remembered them and knew them; and many were those who saw in them only their strangeness.

“The wings of the bird were wide, and she cast a great shadow as she flew. In the company of the other seabirds, she learned the ways of the waves on that coast, and the ways of the hot air that rises and the cold air that falls. The birds which flew on the knife’s edge between the air and the waters, she learned from, and from the birds also whose stoop shattered the surface to grasp what lay below, for she would not long take the charity of strangers who threw fish into the sky.”

I knew my words were slipping out of modern speech and into the Old Tongue, into the Ancient Shemmai which was apparently the equivalent of the liturgical language I’d studied as a child. I couldn’t help it—couldn’t do anything but embrace it.

I couldn’t tell how anyone was reacting, anyway, through the mists of my sight.

“But among the beasts of the land, in whose kingdom she was a stranger still, there dwelled one who feared her for each bird of the sea who flew with her. And indeed, a hundred more for each of those there were, seeing in her shadow the harbinger of claws on vast wings, or who thought only of the noisome droppings they must now dodge.”

That got me the laugh I was going for, including one from the subject and target of the story, which was reassuring.

“There was a small bird, a bird not used to anger but well accustomed to passion. He would raise his voice in alarm, when that shadow came near, and he thought in this manner he was protecting the chicks who sheltered near him. Let you fly but one wingbeat closer, said the small bird to the vast one time and again, and it will not be alarm that is called but the call for aid; and time and again, he saw the larger bird retreat higher into the air, and those that sheltered near him live another day.

“But if it was written in the world, it was still not known—did she hunt the nestlings under his wing, or did she hunt the thermals whose kiss of sun was the thrown shade of her flight? And this bothered him not, for no shadow is as great as the work of the day. A bird must feed, and a chick doubly so; a nest must be maintained, and even these concrete tasks were accompanied by social ones and the need for rest.

“The seasons marched and flowed. And to the attention of the small bird, the great-winged one faded, as did the blackness of her plumage. Did her droppings fertilize this tree or that? Why should it matter? Any tree so close is no further than another. Any tree so far is no closer than another.

“No more was the stranger a thing the bird took notice of, if she was present at all; for when the stranger learns the ways of those who dwell in a place, a stranger is no more. And in time she healed, and she flew and flew, and returned only in strange days; and she knew well enough not to approach him or the members of his flock, for no one bird is so great as to face the judgment of the many. And in time both died, and their children and their children’s children, and the memory of their lives was as nothing within the memory of the world.”

I took a long, slow breath. When I spoke, my voice was abrupt instead of flowing, strictly modern without the slightest hint of the archaic.

“He was born, and he’ll die someday—he knew that. It was easier, in the end, to dismiss and move on. More efficient.”

The silence afterwards was nerve-racking. I did my best to keep a neutral, composed face during it, and eventually the moment broke with a deep grunt as Hitz rose from the bench, nodding at me. The rest of us—all four of us, which was hilarious even in the moment—startled and then flushed in embarrassment, and I had to strangle the impulse to break into laughter.

“Setting up,” Hitz rumbled with an odd look in their eye. “Y’got a few afore we play contentment in.”

“Badger, Via’s over there looking your way.” Waselle shot to her feet, giving me a brief look halfway between appraising and approving. It passed in a flash, leaving her with a mischievous smile as she crooked her finger at the senior glassblower. “I want to poke fun at you two for being so obvious that even Sophie could see you’re courting—”

“—hey,” I protested weakly, deeply confused by the sudden shift. “Rude.”

“—’cause even if she’s clever, she’s new, so let’s go,” she continued, rolling over my protest.

“Y’sure?” Badger glanced where she was looking and raised his eyebrows in reaction. He was very obviously trying to play it cool, but his breath caught and a flush hit his cheeks. “Huh. Ain’t wrong. Rain does ends at camp-break some days.”

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I looked over my shoulder to see Via in what could only have been a deliberate pose, hands on cocked hips and one heel raised. She was in quarter-profile, talking with someone whose name escaped me—maybe one of the carpenters, or the apprentice—as if she wasn’t paying attention to us, but I caught her eyes flicking over to glance at her mentor.

Also, she couldn’t fully suppress her grin, which helped give away the game. So I nodded at Waselle and waggled an eyebrow at Badger, even though I had no idea why the reaction to my story was for everyone to bail abruptly, leaving me and—ah.

“Wonder why,” Waselle murmured dryly, “a girl would wear pants that tight. Obviously no reason, no explanation. Well?” She prodded Badger under the ribs, in a gesture that I recognized from Kelly in the first days of my time in Kibosh.

“Ain’t proper,” I heard him mutter, hands clenching on the edge of the table. “It’s one thing to lay some thoughts down, talk about maybe and what might be. But she’s still apprenticed.”

“Badger Mitzra!” The young man to my left had gone forgotten by the rest of the table for a moment’s drama, and I wasn’t the only one who jumped as a result. “I will not tell you not to be a fool. As junior as I am, even I am not so young. But if you condescend to a woman who already inhabits the day when she will be your equal in position, you say in doing so that on that day, you will still see her as your lesser.”

“Novice, y’don’—”

“Talk. To. Her.” Veil’s apprentice leaned over the table on his elbows, gaze boring into Badger’s eyes for a long moment that left the older man paralyzed. There wasn’t any magic in it, and no Skills being used that I could feel; it was pure presence. “Well?” He waggled his hand in a walking gesture, smiling a little. “Go!”

I leaned back as Badger practically fled from the table towards Via, a look that mingled joy and relief on his face. Waselle followed in his wake, shooting a triumphant look back at us as Badger hastened to the junior glassblower’s side. They clasped hands with more passion than most people I’d gone to bed with had brought to fucking me, so I judged Waselle’s smirk well-earned.

“What are your intentions in Yelem?”

Having thoroughly forgotten that I wasn’t alone there—a bit of a feat, since the two of us sharing the table in everyone else’s absence had been so brazenly engineered—I startled, thigh slamming into one of the table’s supports. I winced as I turned, rubbing my leg absently.

The world is not the world around this one. In a breath, it is diminished by his absence; in another, all warps around the gravity of his presence.

My eyes narrowed at the thought that drifted across my mind, composing myself enough to send up a wordless wash of thanks. “To live here in joy,” I said shortly. “For a very long time; I wasn’t likely to reach my century, back where I came from. Why is calling you Flame offensive?”

“Do we bandy truths to avoid honesty, then?”

I paused at that, erasing the first couple of things that I might have spat back at the blandness of his studied neutral face. “It’s not just a narrow truth. I’ll probably invent a few things, teach a few people, maybe more. I won’t stay idle, and I’ll give back to the community, narrow and wide—that’s part of living here, and part of living in joy. Is this an interrogation or a conversation?”

My interlocutor folded his hands in front of his shoulders in some sort of complicated-seeming gesture—it wasn’t body language I’d seen from anyone else in Kibosh, so I was guessing it was something Sudh-specific. “Do you know how Eymee Plainsheart names me Torch?”

I hid a frown at that, and at its grammar. “I’m guessing you don’t mean that, like, she pushes air through her voicebox and forms phonemes with her tongue and mouth, so… no?”

“I was on no duty, and the night was so early as to be long, and as deep. A Godseed was threatening to fall without the Forest, and much of Kibosh was absent to harvest it.” He spoke distantly, matter-of-factly. “Some manners of creatures too slight to provoke the notice of such powers… escaped attention. They were shrouded to arcane magics and the God Within, but not to the one hundred and forty-five, the Pure Gods.”

Pure Gods, I thought to myself as he paused, nodding at him to continue. I hadn’t heard that term before, but it was obvious enough in context, even if pure was personally distasteful as a word.

Shem’s Gods used to be people, call them what you will—heroes, Risen, Ascenders. Sudh’s Gods were created by ritual and expectation, clean slates that bore no history.

“With permission, I raised a hand in prayer,” he said, back straightening as a hint of pride crept into his voice. “I brought forth into Shem the light of Lanterns Welcome All Travelers Home, a lesser form of Hearthlight Beckons.”

I cocked my head to the side, digesting that. A night early enough to be long probably meant that the Godseed breaching the wards of the Kingdom had outright spent the entire day under whatever light the moon and stars were providing. Brought forth into Shem, so no delineation, a foreign God manifesting into Shemmai land that would otherwise have been rebuffed by the Ward.

Welcome all travelers home. Can’t argue with that. “How many,” I asked softly, “did you save?”

“I do not believe any would have died for my inaction.” He shook his head firmly. “But the honor of welcoming these was given to me: two adults, two children, fifteen animals of honor, and the two herds those had in their care. In grace and to remind me of this honor given, even if not earned, Eymee Plainsheart named me Torch; and so she names me still.”

“That’s… a lot.” I closed my eyes, brain churning on that. “I mean, for one thing, just because someone else might have been able to save them doesn’t mean that you didn’t save them. Not that—sorry, I don’t mean to, shouldn’t argue with you about your story.” I couldn’t help picking apart the trivial details—animals of honor was a fascinating phrase to use for dogs and ponies—but I let that distraction flow through me and away.

There was something there, some dynamic of the name. What did it mean that the honor was given, not earned? Did it tie in with his feelings that he… wasn’t actually helping, not really, he was being allowed to feel like he was helping?

If that was what was going on… Spark, I mused, what does it mean that a woman left behind her name…

… and became known as Fleeting Are Tyrants. The thought sort of followed from mine, less sharply intrusive and more blended.

I grimaced. I had a guess, and if I was right, I really had been a total asshole to the guy.